Preservation of passive constructions in a patient with primary progressive aphasia

• Published in: Cortex Vol. 50; no. Jan; pp. 7 - 18
• Main Authors: Zimmerer, Vitor C., Dąbrowska, Ewa, Romanowski, Charles A.J., Blank, Catrin, Varley, Rosemary A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.01.2014; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adult and adolescent clinical studies; Aged; Agrammatic comprehension; Aphasia, Primary Progressive - pathology; Aphasia, Primary Progressive - psychology; Biological and medical sciences; Brain - pathology; Cognition Disorders - etiology; Cognition Disorders - psychology; Comprehension; Disorders of higher nervous function. Focal brain diseases. Central vestibular syndrome and deafness. Brain stem syndromes; Humans; Language; Language and communication disorders; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Medical sciences; Middle Aged; Nervous system (semeiology, syndromes); Neurology; Neuropsychological Tests; Organic mental disorders. Neuropsychology; Primary progressive aphasia; Psycholinguistics; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychomotor Performance - physiology; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Reversible sentences; Semantics; Speech Perception; Syntax; Agrammatic comprehension; Syntax; Primary progressive aphasia; Reversible sentences; Human; Verbal comprehension; Preservation; Agrammatism; Cognition; Language disorder; Case study; Communication disorder; Language; Sentence
• ISSN: 0010-9452; 1973-8102
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2013.09.007

Research into agrammatic comprehension in English has described a pattern of impaired understanding of passives and retained ability on active constructions. Some accounts of this dissociation predict that patients who are unable to comprehend actives will also be impaired in the comprehension of passives. We report the case of a man with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) (WR), whose comprehension was at chance on active sentences, but at ceiling on passives. In a series of reversible sentence comprehension tests WR displayed difficulties with active transitives and truncated actives with an auxiliary. In passive sentences, he displayed sensitivity to the agent marker by, as well as the passive morphology of the verb. This pattern of dissociation challenges current theories of agrammatic comprehension. We explore explanations based on the distinction between morphological and configurational cues, as well as on the semantic and discourse related differences between active and passive constructions.